TORO, 2006 creation

Presentation

After “Transhumance, l’heure du troupeau” and “Les Trottoirs de Jo’burg…mirage”, TORO is the third section of the promised triptych of Oposito’s grand allegorical parades.

Allegory

We perform in the street
As we enter into the arena.
The crowd is the bull,
We the toreadors
The Bullfight begins
The fabric of our dreams attracts its gaze
A ballet of seduction where the theatre is a hand to hand fight
Without clashes, free and passionate.
From act to act
Our allegorical banderillas separate the crowd
At last, when it is ready, in front of us
Eye to eye,
We deal to it the ultimate death blow, that of a shared story…..

The idea for this show came when Jean-Raymond Jacob and Enrique Jimenez were travelling together in Mexico in 2004 and 2005. On the northern and southern frontiers, where contradictions seem flagrant, where periods of history are superimposed on the corner of a street, they found something common to both of them.

It was a big lesson in humility for artists, who for 20 years, have attempted to provoke modern day rituals.

Why TORO? For twenty years we have travelled through the cities of France and elsewhere, to produce our mythical Corridas. But also because the “relationship” man has with the bull goes further than the history of the arena. Since the earliest times, and in several civilisations, man has not ceased to project the fantasies of his imagination, from the “Minotaur” to the “Taureau Bravo”, on the one hand God on the other sacred animal. The bull’s story is fascinating, it is the story of dreams and profound emotions.

The myth which surrounds the universe of Bullfighting provides a range of universal emotions, blending the religious and the pagan, the sacred and buffoonery, life, death and eroticism, by the beauty with which a man dressed as a woman in a costume of light, masters his gestures to overcome fear, before taking life or dying himself.

It is not a question of positioning ourselves for or against, nor to make a show about the Bullfight, but to play with the gestures and fantasies which surround this ritual from another time, to be inspired by its natural dramaturgy, and its contradictory emotions, in order to invent our own Corrida inhabited by Bulls from the past and today.